Niels de Haan

Hello!

In my research, I primarily focus on normative ethics and social ontology, especially on how to accommodate our considered moral judgments about various types of groups within ethical theory. I focus on questions such as whether groups can be moral agents, whether they can have moral duties; and whether they can be morally responsible in their own right. More broadly, I am further interested in business ethics, meta-ethics, philosophy of action, and social and political philosophy. 

As of 2022, I work as a lecturer and researcher at the Philosophy Department of the University of Vienna. I am an editor for Journal of Social Ontology. And I am currently a Research Associate (2022-2025) at the African Centre for Epistemology & Philosophy of Science at the University of Johannesburg. I further organize the recurring Collective Ethics Seminar together with Olle Blomberg and Gunnar Björnsson.

Before my current position, I worked as a post-doc in the ERC Project 'The Normative and Moral Foundations of Group Agency' from 2021 to 2022 at the University of Vienna. In 2021, I completed my PhD in Philosophy with honors at the University of Vienna. The title of my dissertation is 'The Foundations of a Theory of Collective Ethics'. My supervisor was Prof. Hans Bernhard Schmid, and my review committee consisted of Prof. Deborah Tollefsen and Prof. Gunnar Björnsson. Before my PhD, I did my bachelor and research master in Philosophy at the University of Groningen.